Gardening tips and advice for producing the best home grown tomatoes.

There really isn’t a lot to do in the garden in January for a tomato garden. You can select some tomato seed and if you have a heated greenhouse you can start to sow your tomatoes during January. But for most people it will be better to wait until early March when the weather warms. Ideally, if you haven’t got a heated greenhouse, you should be looking to have your plants available and ready for planting out around early April once the risk of frost has subsided. You would normally expect the tomato plants to be ready from seed after about 4 – 6 weeks, this is type dependent but usually you can get a better idea from the packet.

Meanwhile you could just spend some time researching and reading up on the different tomato plant varieties and selecting the ones best suited to your needs, irrespective of whether you have decided to grow from seed or purchase the plants ready to go.

There are always some general maintenance jobs you can do in preparation for the growing season. Greenhouses in particular generally need a bit of sorting out.

Around the end of the growing season for your region with the colder nights coming in and perhaps a possibility of frost on the horizon, you need to start thinking about how to ripen tomatoes that are still green before you loose them completely.

One of the ways of ensuring that your tomatoes ripen is to continuously harvest your tomatoes as they become ready for picking, this releases energy to the tomatoes that are not quite ready and will encourage them to ripen.

Another general suggestion is that if you note that your night time temperatures are dropping below 70F then there is little to no chance of any new blossoms becoming fruit, so pinch these out and direct the energy they would otherwise have taken to your fruit that still needs to ripen.

In order to grow good tomatoes that are free from disease, have a good plump juicy body and are plentiful on the vine there are 3 key aspects you need to take care of to get the best from your plants. It involves a little forethought and planning on your part but the results will make it well worth the effort. So exactly what do tomatoes need to grow?

First, as they say about real estate, its location, location, location, tomato plants are true sun worshipers and need to be in the sun for at least 6 hours a day in order to provide plenty of fruit on the vine.

Second, they need to get the correct nutrients to flourish and the place they get them from is the soil helped along by the correct watering program. If you are planting the tomatoes in the garden it is essential that the ground is properly prepared for planting with plenty of compost and or fertiliser dug into the soil to aid growth. Once planted they should be revisited fairly frequently with some sort of feed and I would recommend this is done at least once a week, especially if you notice that your plants are flagging a bit. You can either purchase specialist tomato feed (don’t forget to refer to their instructions) or you can use your left over ground coffee and place this around the base of the plants. Do this and before you know it you will have lots of lovely fresh tasting tomatoes.

This is a short video that discusses which are the best tomatoes to grow in your garden and giving the reasons why, some of the suggestions include cherry tomatoes (sweet one hundred), patio type tomatoes and heirloom tomatoes like BrandyWine or Cherokee Purple.

A very common tomato pest is the aphid, on their own these little beasties look fairly innocuous and harmless, unfortunately they are not stone kickers and when they arrive, seemingly out of thin air, they arrive by the droves.There are also hundreds of different species of aphids.

There are loads of different ways to treat aphids and if applied at the right time they will work pretty effectively. A small but significant problem however is their ability to multiply, without having to mate and their persistence.

Making your own compost is environmentally friendly, very easy and will save you money. So instead of using compost bought from a garden centre or garden supply store, why not set up a little corner of your plot for recycling your kitchen waste and garden cuttings. The video below shows you what you need to do to set up your own garden compost system and how to get it started.

Preparing the soil for tomatoes is an important aspect of caring for tomatoes, because they need loose soil which has plenty of nutrients in order to form a decent root system. By making a compost pile in your garden you can ensure that you have the main ingredient you need for proper soil preparation.

Many people simply don’t have access to a decent patch of soil and as a result think that growing tomatoes is beyond their reach. But tomatoes, being what they are, can be easily grown in containers of some sort and are very well suited to being grown in grow-bags.

Ideally you should select a fit for purpose grow-bag, but alternatively a 60 litre bag of multi-purpose compost will serve just as well and will easily support the growth of two tomato plants, three at a stretch. In the UK you can plant your tomatoes in May if you have a greenhouse or June if you are planting outside on a patio or some other suitable spot that gets plenty of sunshine. The planting schedule is effectively driven by the risk of a late frost, or rather ensuring you avoid being caught out by a late frost.

Make sure the growbag is laying flat with the compost evenly distributed, a quick shake of the bag before laying it down and opening it up for the plants should sort this out. Also make sure you puncture a few small drain holes in the underside before putting the plants in.

Tomato blossom end rot is a common tomato disease where the lower half or blossom end becomes brown and dry.

There are a number of potential causes for this including the wrong soil type, too much nitrogen and extremes of either wet or dry weather.

Tomatoes don’t really like limey or sandy soil so if the ground you are using has this constituency you are either going to have to use containers or be extra vigilant when preparing the soil. A good idea for the latter is to dig a trench, line the bottom with newspaper and then fill it back in with a good well rotted compost and soil mix, potentially getting soil from another source if yours really is very sandy or full of lime.

An automatic plant watering system for your tomato plants may just solve one of your biggest problems

For many people growing tomatoes, the biggest problem they face is establishing an effective plant watering system. Whether that is due to a busy lifestyle, being a little forgetful or just don’t like the routine of watering the plants on a regular basis.